How one atheist sees life

In The Beginning….

Lately I’ve had a few believers tell me that Genesis is allegory, not to be taken literally. This of course leads to problems with the doctrine of the fall of man and original sin. At the age of six I was able to pick holes in the story of Genesis. It clearly does not make sense. It really is a problem and until now I’ve never heard a story that sounds convincing as to what Genesis is all about. The story of the garden is just wrong and cannot be literal.

I stumbled upon a BBC documentary with Dr Francesca Stavrokopoulou (love those Greek names) exploring her take on the story of the garden of Eden. This video is 53 minutes long, but I think it is worth watching. It is an interesting explanation. It doesn’t do anything for proving a god exists or showing religion in a good light, but it does give an explanation of the story which, to me, makes sense. I’m no expert but the human motives and interactions laid out in the video seem all to common in human life. It makes sense.

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I haven’t watched the video yet. I just want to tell you that christians deformed the original meaning and took it literally, this means that christians with the belief in an allegory are right. The jews wrote down the story of Genesis originally (and very likely they took it over from the Sumerians), and Genesis consists of different layers of meanings in this story. You can find certain esoteric explanations of this story, explaining the male and female aspects and such.

Hi Roel, the story is actually closer to the Zoroastrian creation myth which the Hebrews plagiarized during their Babylonian holiday.

Allegorical or simply Iron Age babble, its ruinous to Christianity which is based entirely on selling an imaginary cure to an imaginary illness:sin. That “sin” is all tied up in Genesis, so without that Christianity really doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Creation myth, certainly. Well, the Vedas might have been around earlier but it’s impossible to say because the hymns weren’t written down until the 7th Century BCE. I think you mean the Sumerians, though, not the Babylonians. The Sumerian empire was first then that slowly bled into the Akkadian Empire which then dulled and Babylon rose. The Babylonians wrote the Enuma Elish which re-cast the Sumerian creation story. The new version catapulted their capital cities patron god, Marduk, way up the order in the existing creation story. They made him a son of the Sumerian Lord Enki who, the new version of events reads, ceded power leaving the one-time fairly lowly Babylonian God to rule all of mankind. In the new edition it is Marduk who slaughters the pre-time chaos embodied in the demon Tiâmat and splits the giant’s body to create heaven and earth. It’s a great story.

From Zoroastrianism the Hebrews lifted the six-part Judaic creation story, the cardinal couple Mashya and Mashyana (Adam and Eve), the duality of the universe, the human condition, the concept of Free Will, and even the End Times prophecies with a Saoshyant – a saviour figure. People believe the Torah was first penned between 2,000 and 1,500 BCE, but that’s a colossal fallacy. The first texts were written around 700 BCE and the final product was only knitted together during exile in Babylon. It was only after this exilic period that monotheism emerged. Before then Yhwh was just a pantheon god, one of the 70 children of El (whose name, not Yahweh’s, is given to Israel: Yisra’el) who was the Devine King in the Ugaritic pantheon which the Canaanites later adopted.

Ra, the sun god, yep. Ahura Mazda also predates Yhwh, but i was meaning just Judaic monotheism. Most Christians think their god was first… Most Christians don’t know what the hell they’re talking about 🙂